Frida Kahlo narrates her life: ‘I’ve had high praise from Kandinsky, Picasso and other big shits of surrealism’
Director Carla Gutiérrez admits that for decades, she was obsessed with the persona of painter Frida Kahlo. She grew up with her story, and like millions of others, felt a closeness with Kahlo’s art. At 19 years old, Gutiérrez, who is from Peru but who has lived in the United States for years, felt challenged by the work of the Mexican artist when she first beheld Kahlo’s painting Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, in which, as a recent arrival from Latin America, Gutiérrez saw herself reflected, missing her homeland “desperately” and “navigating” a new world.
She immersed herself in the writings that Kahlo had left in her diary, her numerous letters, essays and interviews that were published by her era’s print media. It was through these texts, which were available and accessible by the public, that Gutiérrez realized that there were enough fragments of Kahlo’s voice for her to tell the artist’s story. “She left us hundreds of documents, written pieces. They are really a very rich testimony with emotional reactions to what was happening to her at that time. The documentary doesn’t include every detail of her life, what we really wanted was for the public to get to know her spirit, above all,” explains Gutiérrez in a videocall.
And so was born Frida, a documentary that took around a year and a half to finish, and received the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the most recent Sundance Film Festival. Its intimate and unabashed narration takes on subjects that troubled the well-known painter, such as her art’s transcendence, her relationship with Mexico and her spouse Diego Rivera, her desire to be a mother, sexual pleasure and the lifelong bodily pain from the after-effects of a train accident in her youth.
